Parents Against Sexualized Culture

The pharmaceutical company, Merck, the Center for Disease Control and the mental health industry all have a vested interest in hyping a sexual epidemic amongst teens. Merck is producing Guardisil, a vaccine for the Human Papiilloma Virus, the CDC will lobby for more federal grants and the sexual experts will increase their relevance when our perception is that our teenager’s sexual activity is out-of-control. Each of their agendas is served.

It is difficult to accept the reputable Gullmacher Institute’s statistic of only 46% of high school students having had sexual intercourse. This is down from 54% in 1991.

Too many of us have been propagandized that this statistic is in the range of 80-95%. When the media says often enough that all teens are sexually active we begin to believe it. Perception is reality.

“One in four teenagers has an STD” is spread all over the media. When the truth is 1 out of 4 sexually active teenagers has an STD. This means 1 out of 8 children have an STD when you factor in that less than one half of all teens are sexually active.

Story after story in the mainstream media is a distortion of the truth. A man is pregnant. The “man” turns out not to be a man after all but a woman who has not completed her series of shots and operations to appear like a man. We live in a world that attempts to distort reality in engineering an ultra sexualized world. Too many parents believe the negative picture the experts and the media are painting of our youth.

Our youngsters have an even more powerful and extreme exposure to a sexualized destructive culture. Ignorant “wanna be gangsta” peers communicate it. It happens in actions and gossip, in video games, in school, daily IM and browsing the Internet on phony MY Space pages. Children watch MTV that displays the glorification of an immoral lifestyle. MP3s are plugged directly into their brains feeding them vulgar trash.

This generation’s culture civil war is being fought to some degree in every American home. Parents are losing because they foolishly believe by going along with their child’s sexual precociousness their youngsters will not rebel against their authority. The parent’s appeasement never allows them to establish their power, which is the basis of all authority.

Parents should fight to win keeping their children on the right path or will suffer the anguish of witnessing the unfulfillment of the potential of their child. Parents can teach their children to be decent, moral adults but not by being weekend parents. They need to dedicate themselves from the child’s birth to their 18th birthday. It takes nothing less from the parents than dedicating themselves to their children to maximize shaping good human beings especially in this culture of unrestrained temptation.

The strategy for winning the culture civil war is for parents to train their children to listen to them not to MTV. When children do not learn to listen to their parents they do not learn to listen to what comes out of their own contaminated mouths. Their inability to monitor their own speech prolongs the dishonesty and disrespect for their parent’s position as head of the home. If children do not listen to their parents when they are toddlers they do not listen to them as teenagers.

The highest chance of success in raising a well-adjusted child is to start training the child as early as possible. The battles won with infant/toddlers mean the parents have established structure and rituals that minimize opportunities for conflict. When the child has learned to be obedient it will be more difficult for him to openly lie to his parents and everyone else on MY Space about his fantasy lifestyle.

Ultimately it is the responsibility of the parents to guide their children through a minefield of perversion that can encourage their children to make negative life altering decisions. Parents must stay a step ahead of their children to resist giving them permission to think and do things that will have harmful consequences or suffer the pain of being involved with a dependent parasitic adult child.

Parents need to be tougher in this open sexualized society than their parents were. They must limit video gaming, Internet access and sleepovers with families they do not personally know to protect their children from making poor decisions. Children need to be kept innocent until they are mature enough to make intelligent decisions.

Uniting with their spouse and other like-minded parents can strengthen parents resolve to keep children from following the celebrity path of being sex objects. Only by parents having a stronger will than their children will the children be saved from their arrogance of ignorance in a world where evil abounds.

Aware parents and adults can shield their children from being part of a decadent existence and put America on a more solid moral footing.

Dr. Maglio is the author of Invasion Within and Essential Parenting. He is a psychotherapist and the owner/director of Wider Horizons School.